ABSTRACT
When reading Vasari, it is important to keep in mind that he writes from a strong grounding in actual workshop practice, and that his book reflects his abundant knowledge both of the everyday practicalities of creating objects, and of the sorts of things artists discussed amongst themselves concerning their craft and its theoretical underpinnings. His understanding of the theory of art was also deeply tied to his association with writers and humanist scholars, and their own preconceptions about the visual arts, which often were based in classical antiquity. The popularity in the fifteenth century and afterward of Horace’s dictum “ut pictura poesis” (as in painting, so in poetry), meant that the visual arts were thought to share many basic underlying themes with the literary arts: for example, decorum, the role of fantasy and license, and the value of imitation.2 Also tied into the contemporary understanding of the ideal role of imitation were the opposed views of Plato, who in The Republic banned the visual arts from the city-state on the grounds that they merely imitated the lowly appearance of base material things, and Aristotle, who in the Poetics argued that imitation is inherently pleasurable and worthwhile, being one of the principal means through which we learn.
